DRUMS: In search of a file-sharing solution
A work in progress, by Scott Matthews (and friends)

What's this all about?
This document is a rough working draft, an outline, a work in progress. I hope it will continue to evolve into an increasingly detailed, compelling, and plainly productive step toward resolving the mess of the copyright wars.

The intention is for this document to be reasonable to both the established copyright industry as well as to those who seek a new copyright system. The intention is to enrich the environment for creating and consuming digital works by enriching the environment for developing new applications and services to interact with these works.

The intention is to suggest a step forward that won't piss anybody off.

I'm burned-out by all the P2P brawling, why should I read this?
Well, don't read it looking for an "alternative compensation system" because you won't find one here. Instead, read it for a new file-sharing rhetoric, and a new idea that just might work. Read it with a critical eye, and please make suggestions.

What's the nutshell?
My proposal is a new centralized/distributed metadatabase of authored works. The structural idea is vaguely modeled on DNS, along with the a la carte rights granting system of Creative Commons. I call it DRUMS, for Digital Rights Uniform Metadata Service.

Essentially, the idea is to create a central database, along with an authority (or a handful of authorities) that can add/update it. The root DRUMS database would likely include data such as author names, work titles, publication dates, types of work, file checksums, flags indicating which rights remain reserved and which rights have been granted, and so on. It would not contain the actual works themselves.

The root DRUMS database could then be propagated out across the Internet, in a fashion similar to DNS propagation. These distributed DRUMS databases could be queried via a simple and standard protocol, and/or portions of them could be published via protocols like XML/RSS.

How does this resolve the P2P situation?
It doesn't. Instead, it provides a new platform upon which new applications and services can be built. The platform would benefit from a substantial "network effect" produced by the collected aggregation of works, and could compete with P2P.

I have no idea what you're talking about.
Yeah, sorry, the thing is, it's actually a pretty simple idea and I want to be sure you get a feel for what I'm suggesting -- perhaps some examples would help...

Imagine that an author adds new works to the DRUMS database via their authorized provider, and marks them as free for non-commercial use. Once the root DRUMS database has been propagated out across the Internet, a Web site might query it for recent additions that are marked free for non-commercial use. The results could be presented as a playlist to a DJ who reviews them and picks favorites, which then get published into an RSS/BitTorrent feed.